Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Name one thing you ever meant to say but didn’t.”

“I was never very good at expressing affection. I know that was hard for you. Hardest for you, probably. You always took everything so seriously, compared to the others. And then you had that terrible luck in high school.”

“I had terrible luck with how you guys handled it!”

At this Ray raised a warning hand, as if to forestall further unreasonableness. “Patty,” he said.

“Well, I did!”

“Patty, just—just—. We all make mistakes. My point is that I do have a, ah. I do have affection for you. A lot of love. It’s just hard for me to show it.”

“Tough luck for me, then, I guess.”

“I’m trying to be serious here, Patty. I’m trying to tell you something.”

“I know you are, Daddy,” she said, breaking down in somewhat bitter tears. And he did his patting thing again, putting his hand on her shoulder and then drawing it away indecisively and letting it hover; and it was clear to her, finally, that he could be no other way.

While he was dying, and a private nurse came and went, and Joyce repeatedly, with contortionate apologies, slipped off to Albany for “important” votes, Patty slept in her childhood bed and reread her favorite childhood books and combated the household’s disorder, not bothering to ask permission to throw away magazines from the 1990s and boxes of literature from the Dukakis campaign. It was the season of seed catalogues, and she and Joyce both gratefully seized on Joyce’s sporadic passion for gardening, which gave them one common interest to talk about, instead of zero. As much as possible, though, Patty sat with her father, held his hand, and allowed herself to love him. She could almost physically feel her emotional organs rearranging themselves, bringing her self-pity plainly into view at last, in its full obscenity, like a hideous purple-red growth in her that needed to be cut out. Spending so much time listening to her father make fun of everything, albeit a little more feebly each day, she was disturbed to see how much like him she was, and why her own children weren’t more amused by her capacity for amusement, and why it would have been better to have forced herself to see more of her parents in the critical years of her own parenthood, so as to better understand her kids’ response to her. Her dream of creating a fresh life, entirely from scratch, entirely independent, had been just that: a dream. She was her father’s daughter. Neither he nor she had ever really wanted to grow up, and now they worked at it together. There’s no point in denying that Patty, who will always be competitive, took satisfaction in being less embarrassed by his sickness, less afraid, than her siblings were. As a girl, she’d wanted to believe that he loved her more than anything, and now, as she squeezed his hand in hers, trying to help him across distances of pain that even morphine could only shorten—could not make disappear—it became true, they made it true, and it changed her.

At the memorial service, which was held in the Unitarian church in Hastings, she was reminded of Walter’s father’s funeral. Here, too, the turnout was enormous—easily five hundred people. Seemingly every lawyer, judge, and current or former prosecutor in Westchester attended, and the ones who eulogized Ray all said the same thing: that he was not only the ablest attorney they’d ever known but also the kindest and hardest-working and most honest. The breadth and height of his professional reputation were dizzying to Patty and a revelation to Jessica, who was sitting beside her; Patty could already anticipate (accurately, it turned out) the reproaches that Jessica would be leveling at her, afterward, and with justice, for having denied her a meaningful relationship with her grandfather. Abigail went to the pulpit and spoke on the family’s behalf, attempted to be funny and came off as inappropriate and self-involved, and then partially redeemed herself by crumbling into sobs of grief.

It was only when the family filed out, at the service’s end, that Patty saw the assortment of unprivileged people filling the rear pews, more than a hundred in all, most of them black or Hispanic or otherwise ethnic, in every shape and size, wearing suits and dresses that seemed pretty clearly the best they owned, and sitting with the patient dignity of people who had more regular experience with funerals than she did. These were the former pro-bono clients of Ray’s or the families of those clients. At the reception, one by one, they came up to the various Emersons, including Patty, and took their hands and looked them in the eye and gave brief testimonials to the work that Ray had done for them. The lives he’d rescued, the injustices he’d averted, the goodness he’d shown. Patty was not entirely blown away by this (she knew too well the costs at home of doing good in the world), but she was still pretty well blown away, and she couldn’t stop thinking of Walter. She now sorely regretted the hard time she’d given him about his crusades for other species; she saw that she’d done it out of envy—envy of his birds for being so purely lovable to him, and envy of Walter himself for his capacity to love them. She wished she could go to him now, while he was still alive, and say it to him plainly: I adore you for your goodness.

One thing she soon found herself particularly appreciating about Walter was his indifference to money. As a kid, she’d been lucky enough to develop her own indifference, and, in the way of lucky people, she’d been rewarded with the further good luck of marrying Walter, whose non-acquisitiveness she’d enjoyed with minimal thought or gratitude until Ray died and she was plunged back into the nightmare of her family’s money issues. The Emersons, as Walter had told Patty many times, represented a scarcity economy. To the extent that he meant this metaphorically (i.e., emotionally), she could sometimes see that he was right, but because she’d grown up as the outsider and had excused herself from her family’s competition for resources, it took her a very long time to appreciate how the forever lurking but forever untappable wealth of Ray’s parents—the artificiality of the scarcity—was at the root of her family’s troubles. She didn’t fully appreciate it until she pinned Joyce down, in the days following Ray’s memorial service, and extracted the story of the Emerson family estate in New Jersey, and heard about the quandary in which Joyce now found herself.

The situation was this: as Ray’s surviving spouse, Joyce now owned the country estate, which had passed to Ray after August’s death, six years earlier. Ray had been constituted to laugh off and ignore the entreaties of Patty’s sisters, Abigail and Veronica, to “deal with” the estate (i.e., sell it and give them their share of the money), but now that he was gone Joyce was getting a daily drumbeat of pressure from her younger daughters, and Joyce was not well constituted to resist this pressure. And yet, unfortunately, she still had the same reasons that Ray had had for being unable to “deal with” the estate, minus only Ray’s sentimental attachment to it. If she put the estate on the market, Ray’s two brothers could make a strong moral claim to large shares of the sale price. Also, the old stone house was currently occupied by Patty’s brother, Edgar, his wife, Galina, and their soon-to-be-four little kids, and was unhelpfully scarred by Edgar’s ongoing DIY “renovations,” which, since Edgar had no job and no savings and many mouths to feed, had so far not advanced beyond certain random demolitions. Also, Edgar and Galina were threatening, if Joyce evicted them, to relocate to a West Bank settlement in Israel, taking with them the only grandchildren in Joyce’s life, and live on the charity of a Miami-based foundation whose in-your-face Zionism made Joyce extremely uncomfortable.